Every year there are literally tens of thousands of new vulnerabilities discovered across the various software and hardware technologies we rely upon every day. Simple math would seem to dictate an impossible task to manage all of these vulnerabilities and to make the real-world, priority-based decisions on them. Vulnerability management is one thing, but for…

A new Ponemon study reports that the number of data breaches caused by malicious attacksincreased from 31 percent in 2010 to 37 percent in 2011, with malicious insiders being responsible for 33 percent of attacks. In the report Ponemon states, “We think about the evil hacker, which is pretty serious stuff, but in our study,…

If you’re like most companies, you’ve invested heavily in antivirus software. But are you still having to deal with the latest viruses, trojans, and ransomware? Are you having to wait until your AV provider can fix the latest bugs and get you the cure, while your network is left open and unprotected? Instead of asking…

Keeping the bad guys out is what comes to mind for a lot of us when we think of securing our companies’ IT environment. And to be honest, this mindsit might very well be the reason we hear about so many data breaches. Companies are getting hit with breach and breach of sensitive information despite…

It has been roughly a year since we released our original paper titled “In Configuration We Trust.” The goal of that research was to try to draw awareness to the fact that a lot of security improvement can be made simply by how you architect your network and configure your operating systems and applications. These…

I remember back in school working on an essay for days, saving it to my local 5 ¼ inch floppy just to find a disk error when trying to print it the day before it was due. Remembering all that I wrote, and then actually doing the work, gave me an unsettling feeling in my…

The Ponemon Institute along with Trend Micro recently surveyed more than 700 ITprofessionals on the subject of the human factor in data breaches. According to the survey, 78 percent of respondents have experienced a data breach as a result of negligent or malicious employees or other insiders. This doesn’t surprise us here at BeyondTrust. We…

I think we’re all familiar with the concept of “good, better, best.” This theory allows us to measure how our actions rank against whatever end goal we may have established. In order to achieve our goals, we have to be sure our choices and our actions are “best,” as settling for “good” or “better” could…